President Donald Trump left office, but US decoupling from China is still well underway under Joe Biden, who has kept Trump’s tariffs in place and issued his own limitations on US investments in Chinese industry. Where Trump focused on a wide range of imports, Biden has targeted Chinese ambitions in the semiconductor industry. The White House’s commitment to “derisking” the relationship between the two countries is evident in both the $50 billion CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 and the $370 billion investment in green businesses that accompanied the Inflation Reduction Act in 2023. Together, these two policies seek to diminish US dependence on Chinese raw materials, especially rare-earth minerals, and to reshore high-tech production to the United States.

It’s one thing to talk about decoupling; doing it is much more difficult. And the United States has more to lose, in many respects, than China, because American firms are more reliant on supply chains that run through China than Chinese firms are on supply chains that run through the United States. Certain products, like consumer electronics, are difficult to relocate from Chinese factories, which have enormous productive capacity and currently supply 70% of US annual imports; China, on the other hand, only imports 15% of its consumer electronics from the United States. There is some indication that decoupling is doing what the last two presidents have intended: the United States imported only 16.6% of its total goods from China in 2022, down from 21.6% in 2017 — and US goods en route to China made up 8.4% (up from 7.3% in 2017) of total US exports. But beyond that, it is too soon to tell whether US efforts at decoupling will have the desired effect.

After all, once decoupling is underway, it can have all kinds of adverse consequences — a reality of the sheer complexity of globalization. For example, Trump’s trade war, intended to bring jobs back to the United States, instead killed as many as 300,000 jobs on US soil, while shaving a mere $2.5 billion off a then $340 billion trade deficit with China. Decoupling can also drive the concentration of global trade, the very problem plaguing microchip production, by diminishing the competitiveness of certain sources and sites of production.